Legal Commentary

"There" And Back

By Big Tent Democrat

I saw this Ta-Nehisi Coates post linked at Daily Kos and was struck by this quote Coates mentions from an anonymous WaPo reporter given to Jeffrey Goldberg:

It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They're anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters. Ezra Klein is a talented guy, but he's just an absolute partisan. If this is where journalism has to go, so be it, but I don't want to go there.

(Emphasis supplied.) It seems to me that these Beltway reporters know less about their business than almost anyone. Forget for a moment that the history of journalism demonstrates that it began as nothing but partisan operations. Let's stick to the "modern" era where "nonpartisan" journalism was supposedly born. Perhaps the anonymous WaPo reporter remembers the late Robert Novak:

In 1963, Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans, a former Congressional correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, to create the Inside Report, a newspaper column published four times a week. [. . .] Their column mixed standard reporting with their own editorial opinions. It began with muted, mostly centrist views, but their words drifted rightward over time.

(Emphasis supplied.) The Evans and Novak Inside Report column, and later Novak's solo column, was carried for decades by, yes, the Washington Post.

Indeed, in 2003, Novak broke some news in his Washington Post column. It was about an undercover CIA agent named Valerie Plame. Maybe the anonymous WaPo reporter remembers that one.

Now, here's the thing -- before he got really old and became a crank, Novak was a good reporter, even though his political views were pretty clear for anyone to know.

And I am pretty sure he covered Democrats.

I am not a big fan of Ezra Klein's work. The main reason is that in he is viewed (and sometimes sold) as an "activist" blogger/reporter when he is basically a Beltway pundit. He is not a progressive activist. He is a new form of Beltway pundit. Indeed, he is a modern day Robert Novak in a new medium really.

In its own way, WaPo is merely going back to "there."

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 27, 2010 (boomark / email).